The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (New York Review Books Classics) (69 page)

BOOK: The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (New York Review Books Classics)
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THE PHILOSOPHER AND THE POET

Sometimes it takes a poet to deflate effectively the windy pronouncements of a philosopher. To Theodor Adorno, who declared that, after Auschwitz, no art was possible, Joseph Brodsky replied: “Indeed, not only art, but breakfast as well.”

OLYMPICS

I recently had a chance to see again the notorious (yet remarkable) documentary film that Leni Riefenstahl made of the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. I was struck by one tiny detail, which certainly was not deliberate and could not have attracted anyone’s attention at the time. In a passage devoted to the sailing competition, the camera caught for an instant the face of a crew member on a boat, at the height of a race. He was hauling in the jib sheet with all his might, and a cigarette was dangling from his lips.

This image lasted for little more than two seconds, but for us it is stunning. At the time, it was so spontaneous, familiar and natural; today, it seems to come from another era.

In the Olympic Games nowadays, it is commonly accepted that many competitors show up stuffed to the gills with all sorts of drugs (which the relevant authorities are careful
not
to control, unless it is by methods whose ineffectualness has been duly guaranteed beforehand).
Yet should any sportsman enter the stadium with a cigarette or a pipe in his mouth, one dares not contemplate the fate that would befall him.

Surely, at the least he would be locked in a madhouse, if not stoned to death on the spot by righteously angry crowds.

But why does this simple image from an old documentary fill us with so much nostalgia? Is it not because it suddenly brings back memories from a bygone age, when it was still possible to engage in a sporting competition
just for the sheer fun of it
?

AUTOCRATS

One characteristic of autocrats which is inimitable is their naïveté. After all, despots are perhaps less cynical than credulous. An example is the anecdote told by Shostakovich in his memoirs: a general of Tsar Nicholas I had a daughter who married a Hussar against her father’s will. The father begged the tsar to intervene, and Nicholas immediately issued two edicts: the first one, to cancel the marriage; the second,
to restore the daughter’s virginity
.

BUSHFIRE

By mid-afternoon, our entire street—a dead end, climbing halfway up a wooded hill—is shrouded in acrid smoke, as opaque as a thick fog, creating an eerie twilight. By five o’clock, this grey fog turns red—a diffuse colour of fire, though no flames are visible yet. Electricity and telephone have been cut. We load the car with some essential belongings; documents and papers fill our suitcase; in my briefcase, stacked with letters and manuscripts, there is room left for only one book. There are some ten thousand books in the house—old and new, read or unread, all equally loved, needed, irreplaceable; which one should I save? There is no time now to ponder this question; in a hurry, I grab a thick volume (1,000 pages)—recently arrived, as yet unread: Cioran’s
Cahiers 1957–1972
(his posthumous masterpiece, as it turns out) . . .

Unlike the neighbouring suburb, our area was ultimately spared. The next day we unloaded the car, unpacking at leisure our emergency luggage. As I was going to put the Cioran volume back in its original place on the shelf, propelled by a sudden impulse I opened it at random and came across the following entry (p. 410, top of the page):

Henri Thomas told me, a long time ago, that he saw in a cemetery in Normandy a grave bearing this inscription: X***, born on ——, deceased on —— and underneath: MAN OF PROPERTY.

I burst out laughing. In my haste, I had picked up exactly the right book. I don’t remember who said this, but it is absolutely true: “Past a certain age, we read nothing perchance.”

MEMENTO MORI

D
O YOU
grieve at the thought that your life must come to an end? The alternative could be worse—Swift showed it convincingly in
Gulliver’s Travels
. Arriving in Luggnagg, Gulliver heard of the existence of “Immortals” among the local population. From time to time a child is born with a large round mark on his forehead, a sure sign that he is a “Struldbrugg”: he will never die. This phenomenon is not hereditary; it is purely accidental—and extremely rare. Gulliver is transported with wonderment: so, there are some humans that are spared the anguish normally attached to our condition. These Struldbruggs must be able to store a prodigious wealth of moral and material resources through the ages—a treasure of knowledge, experience and wisdom!

In the face of Gulliver’s enthusiasm, his hosts can scarcely hide their smiles. Though the Struldbruggs are indeed immortal, they do age: after a few centuries they have lost their teeth, their hair, their memory; they can barely move; they are deaf and blind; they are hideously shrunken with age (the appearance of women is especially ghastly). The natural transformation of language deprives them of all means of communication with the new generations; they become strangers in their own society; burdened with all the miseries of old age, they survive endlessly in a state of desolate stupor. The progress of medicine provides us today with good illustrations of Swift’s vision.

Recently, browsing again through Albert Speer’s
Spandau Diaries
, I came across an intriguing passage. In the seventeenth year of his imprisonment, Speer noted: “Today I read in Turgenev’s
Fathers and Sons
a sentence that strangely paraphrases my recent bout of calculations
[to fight his crushing boredom, Speer devised elaborate mathematical variations on the remaining time of his sentence]: ‘In prison, time is said to flow even more quickly than in Russia.’ How time must have slowed down in Russia these days!”

Perchance, I had just been re-reading
Fathers and Sons
, and the passage in question actually says the exact opposite. Turgenev describes a middle-aged man who was abandoned by his mistress; broken-hearted, he returned to Russia, where “he no longer expected anything much of himself or of others, and he undertook nothing new”; he aged in loneliness, boredom and bitterness. “Ten years passed in this way—drab, fruitless years, but they sped by terribly quickly. Nowhere does time
fly
as it does in Russia; in prison, they say, it
flies
even faster.” Turgenev states clearly that, in the emptiness of the days, time passes at lightning speed. For Speer, however, who was still young and possessed of a fierce vitality, the enforced inaction of prison life was a torture; instinctively he misread Turgenev’s statement as an ironic way of saying: time passes slowly in Russia, nearly as slowly as it does in jail.

Alexis Carrel, in his classic
L’Homme, cet inconnu
(Man the Unknown), analysed the difference between chronological time (the solar time measured by chronometers and calendars), which is immutable and exterior to man, and
interior
time, which differs with each individual, and within every individual from one age to the other. For instance, in early childhood a year is of seemingly endless duration, for it overflows with physiological events (growth) and psychological events (the uninterrupted absorption of new information and impressions). As one grows older these stimulations become fewer—Evelyn Waugh, lamenting the increasing difficulty of inventing new plots for novels, noted, “Nothing that happens to one after the age of forty makes any impression”—and it results in an acceleration of time, which rushes through this yawning emptiness.

At the age of seventy-nine, Tolstoy observed in his diary that only children and old people live the true life, as the former are not yet subject to the illusion of time and the latter are finally freeing themselves from it. Indeed, at the end of our lives we are like the window-cleaner
who falls from the hundredth floor of a skyscraper: the speed of his fall accelerates wildly; yet, until he hits the pavement, he remains suspended in a timeless void.

We never cease to be astonished at the passing of time: “Look at him! Only yesterday, it seems, he was still a tiny kid, and now he is bald, with a big moustache; a married man and a father!” This shows clearly that time is not our natural element: would a fish ever be surprised by the wetness of water? For our true motherland is eternity; we are the mere passing guests of time. Nevertheless, it is within the bonds of time that man builds the cathedral of Chartres, paints the Sistine Chapel and plays the seven-string zither—which inspired William Blake’s luminous intuition: “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.”

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Putting together the disparate essays of this book entailed some delicate editing, which Chris Feik effected (once again!) with tact and skill. All my gratitude goes to him.

S.L.

PUBLICATION DETAILS

QUIXOTISM

“The Imitation of Our Lord Don Quixote” first appeared in
The New York Review of Books
(11 June 1998); it was reprinted in
The Angel & the Octopus
(Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove, 1999).

“An Empire of Ugliness” first appeared in the
Australian Review of Books
(March 1997); it was reprinted in
The Angel & the Octopus
(Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove, 1999).

“Lies That Tell the Truth” was published in the
Monthly
(November 2007).

LITERATURE

“The Prince de Ligne, or the Eighteenth Century Incarnate” first appeared as the preface to Sophie Deroisin,
Le Prince de Ligne
(Brussels: Académie Royale de Langue et de Littérature Française de Belgique/Le Cri, 2006); it has been translated from the French for the present volume by Donald Nicholson-Smith.

“Balzac” first appeared in the
New York Review of Books
(12 January 1995); it was reprinted in
The Angel & the Octopus
(Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove, 1999).

“Victor Hugo” first appeared in the
New York Review of Books
(17 December 1998); it was reprinted in
The Angel & the Octopus
(Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove, 1999).

“Victor Segalen Revisited Through His Complete Correspondence” was originally published as “Victor Segalen revu à travers sa correspondance complète” in
Le Figaro littéraire
(3 February 2005); it has been translated from the French for the present volume by Donald Nicholson-Smith.

“Chesterton: The Poet Who Dances with a Hundred Legs” is the text of a lecture delivered to the Chesterton Society of Western Australia, Perth, September 1997.

An abridged version of “Portrait of Proteus: A Little ABC of André Gide” was published in
Best Australian Essays 2000
(Melbourne: Black Inc., 2000).

“Malraux” first appeared in the
New York Review of Books
(29 May 1997); it was reprinted in
The Angel & the Octopus
(Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove, 1999).

“The Intimate Orwell” first appeared in the
New York Review of Books
(26 May 2011).

“Terror of Babel: Evelyn Waugh” first appeared in the
Independent Monthly
(March 1993); it was reprinted in
The Angel & the Octopus
(Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove, 1999).

“The Truth of Simenon” is the text of a speech delivered to Académie Royale de Littérature Française of Belgium on the occasion of Leys’s election to the Chair of Georges Simenon (1992); it was reprinted in
The Angel & the Octopus
(Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove, 1999).

“The Belgianness of Henri Michaux” first appeared as “Belgitude de Michaux” in
Le Magazine littéraire
(January 2007); it has been translated from the French for the present volume by Donald Nicholson-Smith.

“The Sins of the Son” first appeared in the
Monthly
(February 2010).

“Cunning Like a Hedgehog” first appeared in the
Australian Literary Review
(1 August 2007).

“The Experience of Literary Translation” has been adapted by the author from “L’Expérience de la traduction litteraire,” published in
L’Ange et le cachalot
(Editions du Seuil, 1998), translated by Dan Gunn. It was published in
Notes from the Hall of Uselessness
(Lewes: Sylph Editions, 2008) and in
Best Australian Essays 2009
(Melbourne: Black Inc., 2009).

“On Readers’ Rewards and Writers’ Awards” is the text of an address to the 2002 New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards.

“Writers and Money” first appeared in the
Bulletin
(17 December–24 January 2003).

“Overtures” first appeared in the
Australian Review of Books
(May 1999).

CHINA

“The Chinese Attitude Towards the Past” is the text of the Morrison Lecture at the Australian National University (1986); it was first published in
The Angel & the Octopus
(Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove, 1999).

“One More Art: Chinese Calligraphy” first appeared in the
New York Review of Books
(18 April 1996); it was reprinted in
The Angel & the Octopus
(Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove, 1999).

“An Introduction to Confucius” first appeared in Simon Leys’s translation of
The Analects of Confucius
(New York: Norton, 1997).

“Poetry and Painting: Aspects of Chinese Classical Aesthetics” first appeared in
The Burning Forest
(New York: Holt, 1986).

“Ethics and Aesthetics: The Chinese Lesson” was first published in
Le Magazine Littéraire
. It was translated from the French by Mary Coupe and published in the
Diplomat
(August–September 2004) and
Best Australian Essays 2004
(Melbourne: Black Inc., 2004).

“Orientalism and Sinology” first appeared in the
Asian Studies of Australia Review
(April 1984); it was reprinted in
The Burning Forest
(New York: Holt, 1986).

“The China Experts” first appeared as “All Change Among the China-watchers” in the
Times Literary Supplement
(6 March 1981); it was reprinted in
The Burning Forest
(New York: Holt, 1986).

“Roland Barthes in China” was first published as “Roland Barthes en Chine” in
La Croix
(4 February 2009); it has been translated from the French for the present volume by Donald Nicholson-Smith.

“The Wake of an Empty Boat: Zhou Enlai” first appeared in the
Times Literary Supplement
(26 October 1984); it was reprinted in
The Burning Forest
(New York: Holt, 1986).

“Aspects of Mao Zedong” was first published in the
Australian
(13 September 1976); it was reprinted in
Broken Images
(London: Allison & Busby Limited, 1979).

“The Art of Interpreting Non-Existent Inscriptions Written in Invisible Ink on a Blank Page” first appeared in the
New York Review of Books
(18 April 1996); it was reprinted in
The Angel & the Octopus
(Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove, 1999).

“The Curse of the Man Who Could See the Little Fish at the Bottom of the Ocean” first appeared in the
New York Review of Books
(22 June 1989); it was reprinted in
The Angel & the Octopus
(Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove, 1999).

“The Cambodian Genocide” first appeared in the
Monthly
(September 2009).

“Anatomy of a ‘Post-Totalitarian’ Dictatorship: The Essays of Liu Xiaobo on China Today” first appeared in the
New York Review of Books
as “He Told the Truth About China’s Tyranny” (9 February 2012).

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